Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing until midnight on Thursday, Mar 22. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

This week, following our Fund Drive theme of “Linguistics on the Silver Screen”, we are highlighting another depiction of linguistics in media: the role of linguistic clues in Manhunt: Unabomber. This 2017 Discovery Channel mini-series depicts (a somewhat fictionalized version of) the FBI investigation of the Unabomber, an American domestic terrorist who mailed a series of package bombs to victims across the United States between 1978 and 1995. Due to his care in leaving virtually no forensic evidence, the Unabomber proved to be difficult to identify through traditional forensic methods. Adding to that difficulty, his victims appeared to be selected at random, his mail bombs were sent anonymously in nondescript packages and there was only one known sighting in 17 years. In his manifesto, the Unabomber said “Some scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human race… comparative linguistics, for example” (Industrial Society and its Future, paragraph 88). Ironically, it was linguistics that led to the identification and arrest of the Unabomber, and the story is a truly fascinating one.

If you haven’t seen this series yet, this is your official spoiler warning for the rest of this post! And although the outcome of the case may be historical fact, we recommend watching the series and enjoying the gripping twists and turns in the story of the investigation.

“What if there’s a wudder in there?”

The series begins with the introduction of James Fitzgerald, a real life criminal profiler who contributed to the case. Although some with knowledge of the true events claim “Fitz” is a composite character representing several investigators, he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist. Fresh out of FBI Academy, Fitz is a new criminal profiler chosen to take part in the FBI’s UNABOM investigation. Quickly becoming frustrated with the FBI’s adherence to unlikely profiles based on little evidence, he suggests developing a fresh profile of the killer, one derived from careful reading of the Unabomber’s own letters and manifesto. He thinks the Unabomber is much more intelligent than the FBI had accounted for, and ultimately an ideological terrorist, not a serial killer.

“Is it Corrections, or Errata?”

The first inkling of linguistics as a relevant avenue of investigation comes to Fitz when he is mocked by his teammates for his pronunciation of the word water, or as he says, wudder, with his Philadelphia accent. Fitz has a revelation–what if there’s a wudder in the manifesto, some clue in the language as to the author’s origins? He invites a team of experts in all the topics relevant to the manifesto, including linguist Natalie Rogers. While the other academics contribute little, Rogers politely asks questions about the language in the text: does it say Corrections or Errata? It turns out to be an important distinction: the format of the manifesto matches the accepted format for dissertations written between 1967 and 1972. The first major clue: the Unabomber has a PhD. Rogers then tells Fitz about idiolect, the concept of linguistic variation at an individual level, or as Fitz calls it, a “linguistic fingerprint”. He is immediately taken by the idea, and it begins to shape his team’s investigation going forward.

Through this idea, clues start to reveal themselves: the Unabomber spells some words in unusual ways, which turn out to match an old style guide for the Chicago Tribune, indicating that he probably read that newspaper diligently at some point between 1949 and 1954. He uses outdated and offensive terminology for women and minorities, indicating his age as older than previously thought, probably at least 50. He’s meticulous, a perfectionist; he writes about his sophisticated philosophical ideas in a somewhat academic register. The picture painted by these clues looks quite different from the FBI’s original profile.

However, word choice and spelling aren’t the only tools at Fitz’s disposal. While grabbing dinner with Rogers, she humorously uses a nacho platter as a visual aid for explanation of the linguistic case for the Slavic homeland. She explains that linguists looked not only for the words the daughter languages had, but the ones they didn’t have. This inspires Fitz to look toward discourse analysis of the manifesto, and the concepts and topics not mentioned by the Unabomber.

Linguists can make a visual aid out of anything.

More clues and theories roll in: he doesn’t mention a family, or friends, and is likely very isolated. He doesn’t appear to have a phone, and doesn’t seem to know about computers, pop culture, or modern tech companies. Maybe, Fitz reasons, he’s been isolated for quite some time.

Eventually, the big break in the case does come from language: when the Unabomber demands his manifesto be published on a national scale, Fitz convinces his boss, who convinces Janet Reno, that agreeing to the demand might result in someone recognizing the language in the document. Sure enough, David Kaczynski comes across the manifesto, recognizes the style and content, and is immediately concerned that his brother, Ted Kaczynski, may be the Unabomber. After hearing Fitz’s working profile, David is stunned by the close resemblance. This convinces him to share more evidence and give up his Ted’s location.

Finally, Fitz is able to help the team secure a warrant to search Kaczynski’s cabin, based on the close linguistic resemblance between the killer’s letters and Kaczynski’s letters to his brother. Language proves to be the tool that provides not only investigative leads, but also probable cause.

Where is the Unabomber’s “homeland”?

Although the account presented in Manhunt: Unabomber is fictionalized, this case is well known to be one that brought forensic linguistic analysis into higher regard. The series depicts the real value of author identification, dialectology, discourse analysis, and corpus analysis, as these techniques conspired to create a valuable and accurate criminal profile of the Unabomber.

Furthermore, even within the bounds of fiction, the story depicts a reality many linguists experience daily: the fascinating applications of linguistic analysis, and the frequent, frustrating resistance from those outside the field. Natalie Rogers is mocked by the other academics even when her insight proves useful to the investigation; Fitz is told repeatedly that language isn’t real evidence, and is repeatedly prevented from following what are truly real leads, with real investigative value. As a linguist, it is definitely a pleasure to watch Fitz and Rogers succeed and eventually lead the case to its close–even if, at the end of the story, they still don’t get the credit they deserve.

One qualm that a member of our staff had was how the Philadelphia accent was depicted in the movie. As a Philadelphian herself, she found issue with how the actor pronounced wudder, as well as the lack of common idiosyncrasies present in the Philadelphian dialect. While the film highlighted idiolects and their ability to reveal aspects of a person’s history, Fitz was played by an Australian actor and, at times, his native idiolect came through. Inadvertently, the show once again depicts how one’s own language can reveal more than initially meets the ears.

Have you seen Manhunt: Unabomber? If so, tell us in the comments what you thought! If not, we highly recommend watching the tale unfold for yourself. For more analysis of linguistics in pop culture, check out last week’s post about Arrival. And don’t forget to head over to our Fund Drive homepage to read more about us and donate TODAY. The LINGUIST List needs your help!

This is Peace Han, one of the student programmers here at LINGUIST List. My unofficial job title is “The new Lwin” 🙂 I am in charge of managing the site, making sure all the features of the LINGUIST List that you know and love are functioning, and managing EasyAbs requests. I have never done any website management before starting at LINGUIST List, so I sometimes take a while to figure out how to handle some of your requests–thank you all for your patience!

One of the most interesting parts of my job is reading the legacy of code that makes LINGUIST List run. Much of the code was first written many years ago by older graduate assistants who were passionate and dedicated to providing the linguistics community with a reliable mailing list and web information service. Over the years, the LINGUIST List website has been evolving and continues to adapt as new updates and technologies are introduced. It’s a great privilege to read and modify and even edit code that has existed since even before I was born, and it’s always an adventure to try to figure out how coding syntax (which can be just as complex as natural language syntax at times!) has evolved over the years. The comments left by my predecessors in the code are still more useful to me than the code itself, reminding me that computers have a long way to go before they can catch up to human language, and this is why I am so passionate about what the LINGUIST List does for linguists around the world.

Outside of my job at the LINGUIST List, I am a student at Indiana University in the Computational Linguistics, BS/MS joint degree program. The Linguistics department at IU and the LINGUIST List both have been wonderful in supporting me throughout my academic career at IU, and I would not be able to complete the 5-year program without your support. I and all of my fellow student graduate assistants working at the LINGUIST List are grateful for the chance to support and give back to the linguistics community while also completing our studies. Thank you again! If you think the LINGUIST List and the various services it offers are valuable, as all of us at LL do, or if you are just passionate about the dissemination of linguistic knowledge, please donate here. We are all grateful for your support!

Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing until midnight on Thursday, Mar 15. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

From all of us, thanks to all of you for participating in the fund drive challenges, and for supporting us here at the LINGUIST List for another year! We depend on you and appreciate our donors more than we can say.

For this year’s Fund Drive, we wanted shine a spotlight on pieces of pop culture that feature linguists and languages. It is not often that we see linguists portrayed on the silver screen. So, when Arrival was said to feature a linguist as the leading lady, it was not unexpected that many in the linguistic community were excited at the prospect of having our field highlighted by Hollywood. Today’s letter discusses the image of the discipline and its practitioners as represented in the movie—if you have yet to see the film here is an official spoiler warning and an endorsement by us here at LINGUIST List.

Arrival begins with the appearance of 12 alien spacecrafts landing in various countries on Earth. As a result, Dr. Louise Banks, a professor of linguistics, is contracted by the US military to decrypt the alien’s language and orthography, which appears as non-linear circular symbols. To do so, Dr. Banks uses a whiteboard and markers to communicate with the aliens. The simplicity of this solution was comically juxtaposed by the intricate machinery used by the physicist working alongside her. As usually, simplest solutions turn out to be be most ingenious. She uses fieldwork techniques that many linguists who do language documentation would be familiar with. She begins by teaching the alien lifeforms her name in attempts to elicit the same information back and moves on to more complex concepts once basic words are established. One of the most exciting aspects of watching the movie as a linguist was seeing how well they portrayed fieldwork, particularly the moments when she has been mulling over a theory and has a break through. Unlike many fields portrayed in movies, Dr. Banks isn’t portrayed as someone who can magically solve the riddle of the language immediately but has to work through the language like any other linguist would.

The film doesn’t just use linguistic fieldwork methods to drive the plot forward but utilizes popular linguistic theories at its thematic center. The film’s plot relies heavily on an extrapolated version Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In particular, Benjamin Lee Whorf’s theory of linguistic relativity, and his discussion of Hopi time. This theory suggested that the Hopi people did not consider the passing of time as a linear progression of days but rather as a cyclic return of daylight. The concept of time and language is central to the film’s plot and Dr. Banks understanding of the alien lifeforms’ language. While this theory is largely contested by the wider linguistic community, the film uses it as a thought experiment on how language could determine the way in which we see and interact with the world. While the film takes it to a degree that the linguistic community at large would find implausible, the film does do a decent job of extrapolating on Whorf’s theory while maintaining the basis of it. More importantly, the film highlights the fact that language is the basis for how we interact as a society and that part of linguistics is trying to better understand humanity through how we communicate.

Despite the fact that her office appears only in a few short scenes early in plot, the filmmakers also put in the time and effort to create a linguistic space for Dr. Louise Banks to inhabit. Leading up to the film’s release, Ben Zimmer at the Language Log documented the painstaking detail with which the filmmakers modeled Dr. Banks’ office, visiting the offices of the film’s linguistic consultants–Jessica Coon, Lisa deMena Travis, and Morgan Sonderegger–taking pictures, mapping the space, and even renting stacks of books from the real-world linguists to intellectually populate the fictional linguist’s world. Eagle-eyed viewers could spot the works of Andrew Carnie, Noam Chomsky, Roman Jakobson, and even Jessica Coon herself, as well as a biography of Ken Hale—whose pioneering fieldwork in language documentation is particularly relevant to Dr. Banks’ role in the film. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer added that Dr. Banks’ most prized books are those of Dan Everett, and that the set designer even sought out a copy of Dan Everett’s work just to appear somewhere in the background of Louise Banks’ life.

Despite the films accurate portrayal of fieldwork and its inclusion of relevant linguistic theory, it still fails to shake some of the stereotypes of linguists. One of which is the idea that all linguists are polyglots and know a wide variety of languages. While having Dr. Banks be a polyglot aided the plot, it perpetuates this stereotype that linguistics is about knowing languages rather than understanding language. The film also implies that linguistics isn’t scientific in its research with Dr. Donnelly stating, “The cornerstone of society isn’t language—it’s science.” A line that is wrong on many of its implications, and which Louise Banks does not go out of her way to contest.

While the movie had its flaws, it was nice seeing a linguist doing accurately portrayed fieldwork on the silver screen. Hopefully, Hollywood can take a hint from the success of Arrival and put more linguists in the spotlight.

Today we are rolling out another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes for this weekend, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before Thursday, Mar 15, before midnight EST.

Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing until midnight on Thursday, Mar 15. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

It’s that time of year again, where we come to you, the linguistic community, the backbone of our organization, and ask that you chip in a donation to help support our operation for another year. And as always, we try to make the Fund Drive interesting and fun by offering publisher raffles. If you are unfamiliar with our Fund Drives, you may be wondering what this involves.

Every week we will be offering a lottery of prizes, consisting of books and journal subscriptions that are generously donated by our Supporting Publishers (see here for the full list of our supporters: http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/supporters/).

For every $10 that you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery. So in other words, for every $10 you donate, you increase your chances of winning. We understand if you cannot donate a lot (most of us are poor college students too!). But we didn’t want you to be left out from the fun prizes, so even if you can only donate $10, you still have a chance to win!

Every little bit helps, and we appreciate every bit of support we receive from you. If you cannot donate, please support us by spreading the word to your friends and colleagues about our Fund Drive.

This is Kenneth with some fun facts about the LINGUIST List for you. As I wrote in my personal letter earlier this week, I edit the Calls & Conferences area of the listserv (in addition to a few others). This area of the listserv features conference submissions from around the world. You can see for yourself using the interactive map at geoling.linguistlist.org .

Last year, we had over 2,000 unique conferences announced over the listserv. Each of these conferences gets edited by one of our editors. We try to make the conference announcements as clear as possible and correspond with the submitters if some things are not clear.

This is a super important area. Not only because this is what I do but because it provides such a huge collection of Linguistics conferences that you can search through, save, or forward to your peers.

As editor, I have a unique perspective. I’m stunned by how varied the field of Linguistics is.

That 2,000 conference figure mentioned above is actually the number of unique conference announcements. Each conference is allowed to post 3 calls for papers and a program announcement. Some conferences choose to simply announce a description of what the conference is geared towards. I’ve made a chart showing how the Calls & Conferences section has grown over the years.

9 years ago, the number of announcements was only two thirds of what it is now. Apparently 2015 was a bad year for the conference program. What do you make of this?

The LINGUIST List relies on donations from people like you to keep areas like Calls & Conferences going. Because of people like you, we can deliver this edited, moderated information.

If you appreciate the LINGUIST List as a source of events in the field or if you appreicate us in general, please donate at funddrive.linguistlist.org.